14th October 2024

Amos and Jesus lived about 750 years apart, but they had remarkably similar messages – and remarkably similar audiences. Amos’s message to Israel remained relevant to the world Jesus grew up and preached in. It remains relevant to our time. There is the following crushing indictment in Amos 8:4-6, “Hear this, you who swallow up the needy, and make the poor of the land fail…Falsifying the scales by deceit, that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals – Even sell the bad wheat?” He observes a society steeped in corruption, where the poor are downtrodden and abused. 

Jesus made similar observations as he viewed the society He was born into. There was the comment on the widow he watched putting ‘all the livelihood that she had’ into the temple treasury and compared her to the rich who made a great show of putting in a small portion of their wealth (Luke 21:1-4). The ‘Sermon on the Mount’ is full of condemnation of those who liked to be seen to be righteous (Matthew 6,7). The text of Mary’s song, when she was carrying Jesus, is therefore unsurprising, “He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly.” (Luke 1:52). There was a lack of justice and compassion.

And today? Those with power and wealth are often seen to be no different. We have the Post Office scandal, Windrush, Grenfell, Hillsborough, sewage in the sea and rivers, food banks. Very often justice is slow in coming to those who have suffered – if at all. Profits can come before justice and compassion. 

Throughout this prophetic book, it is made clear that God’s chosen people, who have turned from genuine worship, will experience the same suffering as the nations around them. They would not be able to enjoy God’s perfect protection despite outward shows of piety. It is a book of fairly fearsome warnings and condemnation, of captivity and destruction, but it contains a shadow of the solution that is in Jesus Christ and his crucifixion. In Amos 8:9-10 we read, ‘ “And it shall come to pass in that day,” says the Lord God, “That I will make the sun go down at noon, And I will darken the earth in broad daylight … I will make it like mourning for an only son…” ’

Everything that Jesus lived and died for is kept back until the last five verses of the entire book. Central to his teaching was the gospel. The gospel certainly has implications for our treatment of others. We are to reach out in mercy to those Amos and Jesus describe as ‘the poor’, but they both preached a gospel of final hope that remains central to the way any believer conducts themselves.

Local congregation:
GCI Market Harborough
9 The Point
Rockingham Road
Market Harborough 
LE16 7QU

Meeting time:
Sunday 4.00 pm

Local congregational contact:
Sinead Henderson 
Email: sinead.henderson@gracecom.church

Word of Life contact:
wordoflife@gracecom.church